My kind of drunk driving sentence … in Norway

I was intrigued and pleased to see this press report, headlined “Big fine follows short drive,” discussing a noteworthy drunk driving sentence handed down recently in Norway:

A Norwegian businessman was ordered on Tuesday to pay a fine of 700,000 kroner for driving 400m while drunk, a court said.  Due to the man’s wealth, the court in the southern Norwegian county of Aust-Agder handed down a heavier-than-usual sentence, which would normally be equivalent to a month-and-a-half’s gross salary for the accused.

“The principle of proportionality implies that we should take into account the entire wealth of the person in cases where the defendant is more well off than most other people,” a copy of the verdict obtained by AFP read.

The 49-year-old man is the heir of a rich shipping family…. The man was also ordered to take part in an alcohol rehabilitation programme — failing which he will have to serve 18 days in jail — and he had his driver’s licence suspended for two years and three months.

The man was arrested in October 2008 after he was found to have more than nine times the permitted blood-alcohol level an hour after he was stopped by police. The man told the court that he had only driven 300 to 400m, and that, aware of his condition, he was going to meet friends to ask them to take him home.

As regular readers know, I am a fan of alternatives to incarceration and also a fan of tougher sentences for drunk drivers (primarily in the hope of achieving a measure of general deterrence for what seems like a deterable crime).  Thus, making a rich very guy pay over $100,000 even for a short drunk drive sounds about right (I think I the kroner/US dollar exchange rate is about 7:1).  Moreover, not only has this sentence made international news, it also has netted Norway’s government a nice chunk of change that it can use on rehabilitation programming or other crime prevention measures.